Canadians should discipline themselves and not allow themselves to be suckered into buying real estate in that country. It is going to turn out badly in my view. Consider this: you have to clear customs to enjoy your cottage. If you stay more than 120 days three years in a row you have to file your taxes in the US as if resident there the whole year. Why would anyone want to deal with such hassles. Give me a nice Ontario cottage for ten times the price any day.

@Keith, the worse thing is that a Canadian doesn’t have the “right” to live in the United States. That means that you may own the cottage, but you don’t necessarily have the right to use it. It all depends on whether you can get through the border station. Andrew shared a video with me that I posted at Isaac Brock. The main thing is that as the United States is moving towards becoming more and more a police state, it will become a less friendly place to spend one’s holiday.

Sweet Jesus, I pray to God that that Altrogge guy doesn’t have a gay daughter because he will fuck her up royally. I hate this abusive oppressive bs parading as love. That post is a prime example of what NOT to say to your daughter if she is gay. It also continues to confirm my ever growing (albeit reluctant) belief that contemporary Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus.

Just for those reading the blog, I’d like to register basic agreement with Altrogge. From my point of view, dan, your post begs many metaphysical, theological, and exegetical questions (often in the face of replies you’ve been given even in dialogue with people at this blog), and is a highly uncharitable reading of both Altrogge’s words and his motives.

The replies given by people on this blog have been… unconvincing. I first thought of “The Last Battle” analogy in conversation here so, um, yeah.

And a lot that has been VERY offensive and uncharitable has been said on this blog about people who are queer (not by you, but neither yourself nor any other one blog administrator took offense or registered his or her disagreement with even the most offensive statements… which means that pretty much everybody participated in those offenses to some extent). Of course, “two wrongs don’t make a right” and all that but, hey, I’m not particularly concerned about being “charitable” to people who abuse their children, while calling that abuse “love”. If it’s uncharitable to say that somebody is abusing a child (hypothetically in the case of Altrogge), the solution is not to flip the charge around on the person highlighting the abuse (“Hey, stop being so mean!”). The solution is to stop the abuse.

So, regardless of your metaphysics, theology, or exegesis, by agreeing with Altrogge the onus is on you to demonstrate how my charges against him don’t also apply to you.

(Cf. this thread for an example of what I’m talking about: http://www.cityofgodblog.com/2008/05/poser-or-prophet-and-gay-marriage/ . In it, homosexuality is compared to rape, murder, bestiality, having sex with watermelons, overdosing on drugs, and considering suicide to be a beautiful thing. Nobody in that comment thread, except for me, takes Benjamin Allison and theroan to task for making those statements. In fact, I’m actually mocked for pointing out the offensive nature of those comparisons. Maybe you’re more sensitive and all that, Andrew, but don’t forget: Qui tacet consentit.)

The onus is not on me to show how your tendentious attack on Altrogge does not apply to me. The onus is on me to justify to my Creator how I use my time, and frankly, I don’t think it would be wise of me to spend a great deal of it doing a blow-by-blow criticism of your very long reply to a single link in Brooks’ post. If I were to engage with you at length, I would want it to be on matters more fundamental than this specific pastoral question, i.e., the more fundamental questions that determine one’s answer to this question that I alluded to above. But frankly, I don’t really have the time or energy to do even this with you right now, so I will continue doing what I think honours God most with my time.

Hey, you’re the one who just to identify with Altrogge in the first place.

That said, if you’re worried about justifying how you use your time, I would tentatively and tendentiously suggest that you seem to have your priorities exactly backwards. All your metaphysics and theology are only relevant to the extent that they impact your concrete, tangible actions (and, I would continue to suggest, are only relevant to the extent in which they make your actions life-giving or death-dealing). Really, what you believe is completely irrelevant apart from its impact upon what you do. With this in mind, it’s hard not to conclude that a lot of metaphysics, ontology, and theology are massive wastes of time.

It does not seem to me that any of the people in that thread were saying homosexual acts are morally equivalent to all of those acts. What they were saying is that (a) they are analogous in various ways according to their view, since they view homosexual acts as unnatural self-destructive sex acts, and (b) that the logic you offer to justify the goodness of those acts would also, as stated, justify the goodness of those other actions. I think the average educated person can understand a reductio when they see one, and not think that necessitates the moral equivalence of the different actions discussed there.

There may be a place for censorship on blogs (I myself considered editing out your gratuitous obscenity in the first comment you made on this post), and I confess to not being a perfect judge of what to do in every case, but the About page of our blog states pretty clearly that we allow for a diversity of views here, and that the statements of one author (and presumably a person of common sense would understand this applies even more to comment writers) are not necessarily approved of by the other authors simply because they appear here.

Yes, I continue to think that Altrogge’s brief comment was basically correct (I did say “basic agreement”, not absolute); I also continue to maintain this does not require me to reply to the tome you wrote in reply to him (not even me or Brooks).

My priorities are to know the fundamental truths first, including truth about ethical matters, and to make decisions about particular ethical cases based on those. I do this, rather than making decisions based solely on whatever might immediately provoke my compassion or pity, because I know unreflective feelings have a better chance of being wrong than feelings I have reflected on, to determine whether they are are appropriate. Also, I would not concede that the most fundamental questions of philosophy and theology do not automatically have implications in practice, so it’s not clear any of the issues I mentioned are not directly relevant to this question. In fact, I think they are, and that is why I said they are more fundamental to *this* particular question.

@dan I don’t have the time or energy to respond to every comment on this blog, I’ll be honest I skim a lot of them. It’s very easy to go to work for, say eight or ten hours and whole discussion has happened in that time. Anyway, I don’t think that silence is an implicit endorsement, if it is then I’ll have to get busy specifically commenting on every Nickelback video on YouTube that the band sucks and should shut up forever lest anyone interpret anything less as an endorsement.

FWIW I hope that Altrogge is motivated more by his first sentiment (that he will always love his daughter) than by anything else he says subsequently in the article. He makes it sound like this would be a topic he could handle in one conversation, maybe not so much though.